14-Year-Old Zaila Avant-garde First African American Wins National Spelling Bee

On Thursday, July 8, 2021, 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde made history. The Harvey, Louisiana teen became the first African American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee in its 96-year history. The only Black winner before her was Jody-Anne Maxwell from Jamaica in 1998. Zaila's championship also breaks a streak dating back to 2008 when at least one champion or co-champion was of South Asian descent.

Zaila spelled correctly "murraya" which is a type of tropical Asiatic and Australian tree. She said she remembered how to spell the word by thinking about Bill Murray, the famous comedian.

Zaila's winning word seemed easy compared to the other words she had to spell correctly before she reached the final stage of the competition. For example, words like querimonious, solidungulate, and nepeta, were much hardest for her to spell. According to Zaila, nepeta was the only word that gave her any real trouble. She said she jumped even higher when she got that one word right than she did when she found out she had won the entire competition.

In the final rounds, Zaila faced off against 12-year-old Chaitra Thummala from Frisco, Texas. Both girls were coached by Cole Shafer-Ray, a 20-year-old Yale student who was the 2015 Scripps runner-up.

After the girls spelled two words correctly, Chaitra did not spell her final word, "neroli" correctly. That gave Zaila the opportunity to become the spelling bee champion.

It took Zaila only a second to realize she had won the championship. Then she gave a celebratory spin and jumped in the air and was covered in confetti before she was presented with her trophy. (See the video above.)

After her night of winning, the champion appeared on several Friday morning shows, including CNN's "New Day," ABC's "Good Morning America" and NBC's "The Today's Show." On all the shows, she said it felt really good to win because she had been studying hard for the competition for two years. She indicated that on most days, she studied about 13,000 words for seven hours. Zaira's hard work paid off. Besides having bragging rights about her title, she will receive $50,000 in cash and prizes.

About the National Spelling Bee

The National Spelling Bee's final round was the first of this year's competition to be held in person at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. The preliminary rounds were all held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year's competition had to be canceled for the first time since World War II. There were eight champions in the 2019 National Spelling Bee.

This year's competition began with 209 spellers, ranging in age from 9 to 15, from five countries: the United States, the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, and Japan. Contestants had been reduced down to only 11 who competed on the final night of the competition. First Lady Jill Biden was present to support and cheer for the competitors.

Zaila's Previous Achievements

Zaila described spelling as a side hobby. Thursday night's win was not the first recognition of her long list of achievements, especially for someone so young. In addition to her spelling bee championship, she has three Guinness World Records titles. She is a titleholder for most bounce juggles in one minute.

Future Hopes for the Teen

Zaila just completed the eighth grade, but she said she has a variety of interests and is looking for some new challenges to tackle in the future. As of now, she hopes to one day play basketball at Harvard. Then she wants to pursue a career as a coach in the NBA or a career at NASA. She said she may also pursue a career in neuroscience or gene editing.

Zaila had been sharing her spelling bee journey on Instagram and gained a following of more than 14,000 people. She also posted videos of her playing basketball and impressing followers with her hoop skills.